Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, image processing method and computer-readable storage medium for developing RAW image data and displaying a result of the development of the RAW image data.
Description of the Related Art
An image capturing apparatus, for example a digital camera, obtains image data by using a image sensor and stores the image data in a recording medium. The image data stored in the recording medium is non-processing basically, and only lossless compression process is applied by a case. Such non-development processing image data is generally called RAW image data. The capturing apparatus or a personal computer (PC) executes process of developing a RAW image data based on the settings of luminance, hue and so on. Then the resultant data is coded based on JPEG-Beseline and is stored as a file in a recording medium.
When the image capturing apparatus and the PC execute process of developing the RAW image data, it is necessary to execute pixel interpolation process or white balance process based on information of the light source at the time of capturing image, luminance adjustment process, hue adjustment process and sharpness process.
Moreover, the development processing must be executed for each pixel of the RAW image data. Because the RAW image data captured by lately digital cameras includes more than million pixels, it takes much time to obtain the result of a development processing after it is started. Besides, the development processing tends to be more complicated in order to obtain high quality image. And a number of pixels of the RAW image data is getting more in future. So, it is necessary to be speeding up both the development processing and displaying a result of it.
Therefore, a techniques of a prior art (U.S. Pat. No. 7,424,171) extracts trimming area to be displayed on a window based on window size and enlargement ratio. Next the techniques execute process of developing not all of the RAW image data but the trimming area of the RAW image data. According to the prior art, the number of pixels to be executed the development process is reduced, it takes less time to complete the development processing and the result of the development processing of the RAW image data is displayed on the window quickly.
By the way, it is possible to edit image, such that you can erase dust spots in an image or add preferable object to an image, by copying a part of image (a copy source image) and pasting the copy source image into another part of image (a copy destination image).
However, the techniques of the prior art executes process of developing only the trimming area. If the copy source image is not included in the trimming area, the copy source image is not executed the development process to. So, if the trimming area includes the copy destination image, it displays the trimming area without pasting the copy source image corresponding to the copy destination image. Therefore, we have a problem that it does not display a proper image which indicates a result of processing, in a case that it executes process of pasting another image into the image to be displayed.